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New strain of HIV from gorillas

5 August 2009

A NEW strain of HIV has jumped from gorillas to humans. So far only one person, a 62-year-old Cameroonian woman living in Paris, France, has been found to be infected with the virus, which closely resembles strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) recently discovered in wild western gorillas.

As the infection was unlikely to have been caused by direct gorilla-to-human transmission, “it would be surprising if there aren’t more human cases”, says David Robertson, a bioinformaticist at the University of Manchester, UK, who was part of the team that analysed the virus (Nature Medicine, DOI&colon; 10.1038/nm.2016).